“... of vision’. They remind us we’re watching a ‘mediated form of seeing’.The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death anticipates The Red Shoes, with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet ...”

“... Goldin reveres Visconti, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Jack Smith. Her images – I’m thinking of a self-portrait at a window, in which she has a curl at the nape of her neck and scratches on her exposed back – form part of an autobiographical narrative, one that reveals in order to keep battling against denial and revisionism. They push back against the ...”

“... class on physics; elementary particles are infinitesimal, but the universe is infinite; Kana is a self-contained hamlet in forested Thuringia, but it is subject to the encroachment of violent outside forces. Herr Köhler runs a rooftop weather station, from which he gathers meteorological data on behalf of the townspeople and analyses ‘data from the ...”

“... welcome the Holy Alliance as ‘the most liberal of all ideas’? Two aspects of Alexander’s self-presentation in the years leading up to the treaty secured its credibility as an instrument of progressive reform. The first was his successful mobilisation of one of the most enduring political scripts of the Enlightenment: the virtuous monarch as ‘friend ...”

“... more or less victorious. The diaries he left behind are melancholy, desultory and remorselessly self-recriminating, consisting in large part of resolutions, inevitably broken, to rise early, study hard and control himself. Yet Johnson was also a convivial, energetic, witty man, the cure for whose weakness (as he said himself) was company. The drive to ...”

“... proposes to address, and often a cover for more pernicious motives. Celebrities are particularly self-serving in this regard. In his essay ‘The Birth of White Saviour Imagery’, Wainaina’s ‘how to’ becomes a caustic ‘how not to’: ‘You should avoid picking up random children you do not know for a photo that you then publish online … no matter ...”

“... of the National Guard then declared Paris a revolutionary commune, a democratic, equal and self-managing society. The Commune lasted just 72 days until the army, which was under the control of the Versailles government, fought through the defences. It ended in the ‘semaine sanglante’, with the soldiers massacring more than ten thousand Communards ...”

“... briefly?‘William and the Nasties’ is a clumsy attempt to satirise the rise of Nazism. Greedy self-interest is what motivates the Outlaws, together with the belief that the law will be on their side. According to William, ‘It’s not stealin’ when you’re nasties. It’s by lor if you’re nasties.’ Even I could see that this wouldn’t ...”

“... speaker writes home to his mother about his brother’s arrest. Poetry satisfied the ‘need for self-expression at a formative period of my life’. But politics came with it: Johnson joined the British Black Panther Party while still at school, and was introduced to Black consciousness literature for the first time: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black ...”

“... Santagata argues that Boccaccio suffered from ‘psychological fragility’ that often led to self-sabotage. Emotionally unstable and intellectually restless, he experienced frequent mood swings that sapped his confidence. Late in life he was certain he had been a failure, especially when he compared his output with Dante’s or Petrarch’s. Yet the same ...”

“... The answer is, of course, censorship. Not imposed – though that, too, possibly – so much as self-imposed. The FO in London – Berlin does not say so, but it can be inferred – knew that the Americans were reading the British Embassy signals: it therefore wanted nothing that burned, nothing contentious or embarrassing – above all, nothing ...”

“... active sections, of their following expect a great deal more. It is a tribute to the coherence and self-confident culture of the British working class that it has produced trade-union leaders who for clear-sighted and articulate service of the interests of their members outshine any in the world. Yet working-class figures in the political leadership of the ...”

“... his theory. Thus, even if his opponents are wrong to regard ‘unconscious knowledge’ as self-contradictory, like ‘unconscious pain’, Chomsky is not warranted in treating it as no more perplexing than the notion of a largely unconscious physiological process like digestion. While he alludes to the problems that currently exercise philosophers ...”

“... healthy contempt for birth and breeding. Leavis was thus already a fine, intuitive polemicist and self-advertiser, who hardly needed much help from acolytes like Ford. The aggression built into the master’s manner, with its churlish tone calculated to knock the politeness out of polite letters, had a more direct and heady appeal to the young than a Guide to ...”

“... era. Man is faulted for ‘failing to use to a sufficient purpose his possibilities’, for ‘self-betrayal’ and inauthenticity, for his death-wish, and for sins against the environment (‘They tore apart my ozone, carbonised my oxygen, acidified my refreshing rain’). God is not unmoved by ‘violence, corruption, blasphemy, beastliness, sin beyond ...”